INTRODUCTION

For at least the past half century, the United States has fashioned itself as committed to racial justice, pointing to the civil rights movement and the wave of nondiscrimination, antisegregationist, and equal rights legislation that followed the series of Supreme Court rulings from the late 1940s onwards. These were important developments, which in many ways shifted the racial ground on which America historically has stood. Less noticed in the political sphere—certainly less celebrated—however, are the counter trends in ideological representation, prevailing political commitment, and dominant social arrangement that these gains prompted as a backlash from the 1980s onwards (Gold 2004).

Old segregationist racism, from post-Reconstruction to Brown v. Board of Education (1954), was what can properly be characterized as an activist segregation. It involved for the most part an active intervention in politics, economics, law, and culture, self-consciously designed to produce segregated city, town, and neighborhood spaces. To combat this activism, to undo its pernicious and debilitating effects and implications, the civil rights movement likewise was compelled to act responsively on every social, political, legal, and cultural register. Coalitional antiracist resistance and struggle, perhaps by definition, are activist pursuits. Laws needed changing, the web of racial covenants and redlining that promoted residential segregation needed unraveling, the closed doors of segregated schools and universities had to be unlocked, inaccessible workplaces had to be entered and transformed from the inside out, voting practices reproducing all-White city halls and legislatures had to be dramatically restyled, and voting districts reapportioned (People for the American Way 2005). None of this would have changed on its own, pace economic determinists of one stripe or another.

Prompted by the tensions between political pressures at home and abroad, the period from roughly post-World War II to the 1970s was one of tension and contradiction between the ancien régime of racist structures and antiracist possibilities. It was a period of promise and projection, expectation and elevation, denial, and, in some debilitating ways, ultimately dashed hope. It was a period, in short, of desegregating commitment and the seeds of a resegregating mobilization. The logic of the old segregation supposedly was swept aside—only to be replaced by the whisper of the new, the subtle and silent, the informal and insidious, what elsewhere I have characterized as born-again racism (Goldberg 2004). This newly expressed segregation, the newly privatizing segregation at the heart of the model I designate racial americanization, is no longer activist but conservative, a segregation in the literal sense conservationist.

To say that racism in the United States was “born-again” is not to say that it ever disappeared. It shifted its modalities and expression, its articulations and dispositions, its ways of being. The public legalities aimed at undoing explicit racist practice in the name of the state redirected principal racist expression and reproduction to the private sphere, both institutionally and personally. And, in doing so, it emphatically sought to protect privatized racist expression from state intervention. But this principal form of contemporary racial americanization, of born-again racism, proceeds not simply by reducing the social to the preferential, and the state to the privatizations of (in)civil society. Preferences are not expressed, enacted, and experienced in a political and institutional vacuum. Rather, public spheres—and the state especially—structure the conditions of possibility on the basis of which choices are to be made, preferences pushed, and indeed whether, when, and what to punish or reward. State structures channel, shape, and mould both the boundaries and the terrain of choice making and their implications; and preferences expressed and enacted reinforce existing state formation even as they inflect and color them.

Conservationist segregation thus fashions the model of racial americanization. This model proceeds by undoing the laws, rules, and norms of expectation that the civil rights movement managed to put in place. It attacks those laws, and the social order predicated on them, as unconstitutional, as the only sort of racial discrimination with which we should be concerned today. Embracing race neutrality, racial americanization nevertheless licenses “limited” racial profiling—for purposes of security maintenance, targeted policing, and medical research—as legitimate for combating the moral panics of terror and the disasters producing it, whether socially or naturally prompted. The Racial Privacy Act initiative, first introduced in California and now traveling to other states identified by racial conservationists as racial battlegrounds, embodies even in its title the logic at work. Racial expression was not to be excised from the body politic. Rather, it was to be privatized, and protected in its privatization (Post 2001).

In the absence of the civil rights spirit, and now in its active undoing, accordingly, the present period conserves (and deepens) the hold of racial preference schemes historically produced as if they were a part of the nature of things. So racial americanization is produced by a mix of doing nothing special, nothing beyond being guided by the presumptive laws of the market, the determinations of the majority's personal preferences, and the silencing of all racial reference, with the exception especially of racial profiling for purported purposes of crime and terror control. This silencing fails to distinguish between exclusionary racist designs and practices, on the one hand, and redressive or ameliorative racial interventions, on the other, reducing the latter to the former for the most part as the only contemporary racist expressions worth worrying about.

William Bennett, self-ascribed arbiter of America's moral virtues, exemplifies the logic in play here. He recently responded to a call-in question on his radio show by saying that, while morally reprehensible and ridiculous, aborting all Black babies would result in a sharp reduction in the U.S. crime rate (Bennett 2005). His “hypothetical” if not hypocritical call, effectively genocidal, is protected as the sort of free speech the wall of privatization around civil society is designed to render critically unreachable. Bennett's “observation” trades on a cache of widespread if no longer explicitly expressed presumptions: that the crime rate in the United States is overwhelmingly fueled by Black criminality, that such criminality is a more or less natural and so inescapable condition of especially the Black poor, but also that it is not unacceptable to issue eugenicist judgments about the implications of hypothetical genocide in the case of African Americans in ways that it would be for most any other group today, Muslims included. This latter presumption trades on the “Africanness” of African Americans, the normalcy, if not naturalness, of early death in the case of the descendants of the despised continent. Hidden from view here is the less extreme logic on which the claim trades, for it is just as surely the case that the aborting of the babies of any ethnoracial background would likely reduce the crime rate, given that some percentage of that rate, large or small, is made up by members of every ethnoracial group. Bennett's racial eugenicism advances itself only at the price of the expendability of Black lives.

Only slightly less extreme, because not quite as explicit, the libertarian pluralist motto of “live and let live” licenses a surplus of possibility and opportunity for the affording few at the expense of the impoverished many. It might more accurately be replaced with the motto, “live free or die,” most explicitly identified with the state of New Hampshire, but which can be interpreted as implying that those who cannot afford the freedom will be left to perish. There is, as commentators on euthanasia have long pointed out, a thin line between (social) killing and letting die. Between making live and letting die, as Foucault (2003) has put it in Society Must be Defended, are histories whitewashed and refashioned, activist interventions restricted, the racial status quo resurrected, revived, (re-)fixed in place.

The privatization of racially exclusionary and debilitating preference expression that articulates racial americanization today makes it more or less unreachable by state intervention. But to secure the shift, to make it truly untouchable by state amelioration, to restrict the competition for social resources in the face of the increasing heterogeneity of society, racial conservationists are keen to supplement their gains by a radical curtailment of state possibility. In this mode, the current commitment by fundamentalist fiscal radicals to de-fund social programs in education, health care, emergency management and response, popular culture and the arts through extreme forms of tax reduction, while increasing military, security, and prison expenditures and investments, brings public funding to the point of bankruptcy. Grover Norquist, contemporary Republicans' philosopher-king, has giddily proclaimed that his aim is so to starve government of revenues that he “can drown it in a bathtub” (Dreyfuss 2001). The overwhelming social commitment to upwardly spiraling support for state institutions of violence, their enactment and (re)enforcement—military, policing, homeland security—in the face of an at best static, if not diminishing, treasury burdened most notably by dramatic tax reductions for the wealthiest 1% of the population entails that the increases in such expenditures can only be supported by squeezing social welfare and support revenues.

In the past couple of budget cycles, hyperconservatives have targeted programs for the poor because these programs both offer easy fiscal targets and lend themselves to convenient ideological rationalization. At the same time, defense budgets, whether narrowly or broadly interpreted, continue to expand. Thus, the defense budget for FY2006 amounts to $435 billion, up 5% from the previous year and almost 25% from its 2002 total of $344 billion. The projected $40 billion worth of cuts in the 2006 budget projections focus overwhelmingly on social programs such as student loans, health care, and welfare for the poor, etc. (Washington Post 2005). If one factored into the figure for the defense budget the entire range of institutional apparatuses sustaining military presence at home and around the world, including $35 billion for Homeland Security, funds to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the considerable sums for their respective reconstructions, the total would reach a staggering $900 billion, up roughly 30% since 2002 (Higgs 2004).

At the same time, funding for education, health, housing, and transportation, as well as emergency relief, has been cut repeatedly. Since 2003, when it was incorporated into the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been reduced by 10% (if President Bush had had his way the cuts would have come closer to 25%). These cuts have had a debilitating effect on disaster preparedness and reconstruction, undercutting the agency's ability to sustain support for those most in need, as we witnessed in the wake of Katrina, and leaving to uncoordinated private charities the responsibilities of evacuation, cleanup, reconstruction, and care. The results, as we now know, have been disastrous.

As with personal or corporate bankruptcy, this emaciation of the social support sector of government revenues forces a radical restructuring of public programming and state governmentality. The immediate implication of such state restriction, and ultimately devastation, is to redistribute wealth upwards. The point, explicitly articulated by neoconservative pundits and neoliberal politicians, is to put more wealth into the hands of the already wealthy. Expenditures of the wealthy, we have so often been told beguilingly, are supposed to trickle down into jobs for the less well-off. But the mission, as much as any, is also to augment the decision making, social engineering, and effective powers of the well-off. The social effect of state emaciation, accordingly, is not that social spending will end completely. Rather, in being redirected into private hands, it is fashioned by the social and political interests of those with capital to spare.

So private (toll) roads, the recent emergence of private electrical grids in the face of blackouts, dramatically expanded privatization of funding for radio stations, policing functions (at least supplementally), certainly schools (in some cases, such as Philadelphia, entire school districts), hospitals, and universities (even public ones) are thrown increasingly into the hands—and so to the discretion of—those who can afford and choose to support them. Even the authoring of key legislation is handed over to corporately sponsored lobbyists—the K Street Project in Washington, D.C.—who craft laws for lawmakers too stretched, low on resources, or corrupt to do so themselves. The effect is not that all funding support for public programming ends, but that funding for almost anything other than explicit behavioral control programs becomes pointedly privatized. The state is reduced to little more than keeping law and order, staving off the violent and, increasingly, even the merely critical, at home and abroad. State interests, on this view, are thus directed, if not reductively determined, by the wealthy with disposable income or investment capital to plunge into political exploits.

Now, the elevated factions of social class in a racial state such as the United States have traditionally been White; more precisely, they have represented the interests of those occupying the structural class position of Whiteness and masculinity. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that in 2000 the top 5% of White wage earners received wages almost double those of the top 5% of Black wage earners. Unsurprisingly, by far the largest contributors to political campaigns in the United States are White men. Under the mandate of radical privatization, funded institutions, programs, and activities thus become dramatically less diverse, both in their programming, scope and commitments, and notably in their employment patterns—even less than they were until only relatively recently, and certainly than they could or ought to be. Hence the fundamentalist conservative outrage expressed by the likes of Abigail Thernstrom, Ward Connerly, and Linda Chavez, as well as the Center for Individual Rights, at the temporary setback in their well-heeled plans regarding the Supreme Court's recent upholding in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) of law schools' limited affirmative action programs for the sake of maintaining a diverse student body. Neoconservative critics committed to a “race-free” America (note, not racist free) have blasted the diversity commitments of the Court's majority as “murdering the Fourteenth Amendment” (Ward Connerly 2003), as “diversity drivel” (Michael Greve), and discriminatory (Linda Chavez), indeed, even “racist” (Abigail Thernstrom) (Chronicle of Higher Education 2003). If it is no longer possible explicitly to restrict demographic diversity, the culture wars can be won by de-funding progressive cultural commitments, by shrinking the cultural horizons of heterogeneity.

There are supplementary sociological factors in play that underpin and sustain the current cauldron of anxieties, paranoias, redirections, renewed restrictions for some and social possibilities for others, with respect to racial matters. Black Americans are no longer the largest minority in the United States. Latinos are growing as a percentage of the overall population (from 12% to 13%, and rising more quickly than any other major demographic group), as, too, are Asian Americans, though in far smaller numbers and at a lower growth rate. African Americans (11% of the population) thus are shrinking proportionately, or at least not growing. Social leverages, relatively speaking, are accordingly shifting. Latinos see themselves connected with some pride to Latin America, or nations in Latin America (most notably at World Cup time, or when the U.S. soccer team plays Mexico or Brazil, or baseball teams occasionally play Cuba). To some degree, and with varying effect, they also have leaders of Latin American countries speaking (up) on their behalf, whether trying to negotiate better conditions for recent (im)migrants to the United States or, in the case of both Castro and Chavez, offering more visible assistance to America's racial poor in the wake of natural disasters than emanates from Washington itself. Asian Americans see themselves connected as a result of family ties, heritage, and nostalgia (if not now also investment) to countries in Asia—notably China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Japan, and Korea. Those connections are affirming, giving rise to a sense of pride in regions that represent at least some success, and which, at least in the public imaginary, are less ostensibly or forcefully racially inscribed.

African American connection to Africa, by contrast, is at best imagined, ideological, in any case deeply ambivalent: fueled on one side by pride in Africa's rich cultural and civilizational legacy, its expansive beauty, and even its fortitude in the face of colonial degradation, but, on the other side, by its current poverty-stricken, famine-common, and war-torn conditions. The tale of anti-apartheid jubilation and the relative success of the new South Africa have paled before Africa's broadening debilitation. And, of late, the concern with overcoming African poverty has become the new White liberal cause célèbre. Witness Bono, Angelina Jolie, and their social influence. As important and heartfelt as these activists may be, their own visibility and exclusively global agenda draws attention from persistent problems at home. Here, Black Americans, who have long rallied in support of Africa, are now edged if not elbowed to the social sidelines.

Related to these demographic shifts and their attendant conditions of possibility and implication, debates about race in the U.S. have shifted quietly, if dramatically, over the past five years. Today the two seminal considerations regarding the Americanization of matters racial have to do with the twin towers of immigration and terrorism. Their ideological connectivity is evidenced in the remarks of the Republican Congressman John Culberson of Texas. In recently sponsoring legislation to arm civilian militias—“boots on the ground,” as he puts it ominously—to patrol the Texas border with Mexico, Culberson explicitly characterizes illegal border crossers from Mexico as “terrorists” (or, when speaking more carefully, as “harboring terrorists”) (Culberson 2005). This identification evidences the increasing shift of racial inventiveness in the wake of 9/11 to the slippery figure of the terrorist as Muslim, a slippage often prompting an (il)logical reversal in the public mind, notwithstanding politically rationalizing denials.

Here, too, relational logics effect ambiguous outcomes. So, as the “war on terror” is mobilized globally and critical attention is pressed upon especially radicalized and radicalizing Muslims, African Americans fade into the fabric of America, becoming less African, so to speak, and more American. Iconic Black figures such as Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice suggest the constrictive possibility of climbing effectively to positions of power, of climbing out of African Americanness, as the devil's choice might have it. On the other hand, this slow dissolution of African America in the remaking of contemporary America (a dissolution thick with traces, of course) is consistent with longer trends of social invisibilities and disappearances. Roughly one-third of African American men have suffered through the criminal justice system in one way or another, leaving them at the margins of civil society and largely without voice. African American youth under eighteen tried as adults are ten times more likely than White youth convicted of similar crimes to receive life sentences without possibility of parole—in California it is twenty-two times more likely (Haines 2005). Racial profiling continues to shine a debilitating spotlight on Black men in the dark of night. And racially inflected impoverishment (like unemployment rates) continues to afflict Black Americans more than others in its spiral upwards (12% of Americans, but 25% of African Americans live in poverty now, mostly without state support or health insurance).

Two further factors fuel this deepening social invisibility, leaving African Americans with a social dilemma more acute than members of other demographic groups. First, America continues to walk away from the commitment to affirmative action. The California experiment is indicative of future trends. In the wake of Proposition 209 (1998), banning the use of state funds for affirmative action programs in hiring, promotion, and college admission or support, the registration of Black students at the better-ranked University of California campuses, as well as the hiring and retention of Black faculty (not to mention women in the sciences, as it turns out) have dropped precipitously. In the fall 2005 freshman engineering class at U.C. Berkeley, for instance, of the 800 new students, not a single one was African American. The number of African American students attending Boalt Hall, the University of California's flagship law school, was nearly as low. It is not an overdramatization to say that Blacks in California are becoming dramatically less visible in higher education, and by extension in the professional workplace that carries status and influence, as a consequence (Brown et al., 2003).

The second factor is even more vexing. Since at least Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court desegregation ruling, the principal stress has been on formal equality before the law. That equals should be treated equally before the law has entailed the veiling of the substantially unequal effects as a result. Those without means are treated far differently than those with. Conservatives see this as an unavoidable, even necessary, constitutive feature, if regrettable, of the American order and social fabric. Once again, we find principal evidence for this in the attempt to make California the laboratory by pushing to privatize racial discrimination, in effect protecting it for the most part from public scrutiny. But it is evidenced also in the attacks on civil rights protections specific to named racial groups as special treatment. Underlying this rejection of supposedly “special” treatment is a drive less to dim the spotlight than to shift it from the public to the private realm, effectively pushing Black and Brown Americans, especially the racial poor, more deeply into the shadow of social disappearance, eroding self-confidence in the face of expanding invisibilities and diminishing opportunities. The already vulnerable are thus made to feel even more so.

The fate of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in late summer 2005 illustrates these trends with furious force. A city of almost half a million, its population when the hurricane hit was 67% African American. One in eight Americans, and double that proportion of Black Americans, now live in poverty. In New Orleans, the poverty rate for Black residents was closer to 50% as a result of the multiplying logic of high racial concentration, which Nancy Denton (1994) has identified more generally. Privatizing the conditions of well-being has meant that wealthy Whites have the best medical care, while the multitude has little or none. The well-off live in gated communities high on the hill, while the poor in the city, as elsewhere, have lived in polluted neighborhoods vulnerably below sea level with close to no garbage collection and few options for ameliorating their situation. Nationwide, White Americans are 79% less likely than African Americans to live in locations threatened by the significant health hazards prompted by industrial pollution (Pace 2005). The powerful drive larger and larger gas-guzzling SUVs, while the impoverished have had little or no public transportation. The newly rich imbibe imported bottled water, while the struggling drink polluted tap water. The wealthy can dine daily in restaurants, while the poor barely have had anything to eat at all, and can afford nothing by the end of each month, awaiting paychecks or welfare subsistence, or both. The wealthy get tax breaks and stock options, while the poor can't even depend on the most rudimentary of educations. The lives of the rich are guarded from those of the poor, whose fate is more likely to be prison than work.

In the case of Katrina, all of this has meant that the federal resources to make the city less vulnerable to the wrath of nature were rendered less and less available, while urban decadence could ultimately be drowned in its own vulnerabilities. The well-to-do could scramble for safety in their air-conditioned, army-like vehicles, while the poor were reduced to a decaying and, for some, deadly domed stadium. The tens of thousands unable to flee upon the evacuation order in New Orleans as the hurricane bore down were overwhelmingly Black, as became clear at the Superdome and Convention Center. Family and other networks could support the mobile, while the immobile were left to flounder in a flooded and rotting city, many losing contact even with the family members sharing their fate. The least lucky lost their lives. The wealthier watched from afar, while the poverty-stricken shared the streets with floating bodies (sometimes of their own relatives), excrement, and oil pollution. The privileged seemed to need no medical care, while the poor restricted to the city got close to none, even as doctors from further afield were valiantly (and in some cases vaingloriously) volunteering their help. The rich were free to roam the country, the poor rounded up and subjected to prison-like conditions, even as they were bussed off to safer turf, their “crime” having been nothing more than their abject poverty and the color of their skin.

Amartya Sen (1981) has famously argued that famines, far from simply natural disasters, are politically produced: the product of strife, war, political conflict, and turmoil. It is these latter factors that more or less inevitably impede or prevent the delivery of food and medical aid needed to avoid or alleviate starvation and death. The same could be said in the case of Katrina.

In the name of securing the city, post-Katrina New Orleans was quickly turned into an armed military camp. Combat ready forces went door-to-door urban warfare style, some among them even armed with fully loaded AK47s, kicking down locked entrances searching for survivors to evacuate. While critics were rightly bemoaning the dehumanizing conduct of war abroad, few seemed to notice that, for domestic purposes, the United States was mimicking tactics of militarization honed in the desert war. The United States, in short, has taken to turning itself into armed and gated camps at home. Our regime of social truth today is shaped principally by a military mind-set circulated and recirculated by all those retired generals appearing on the nightly news programs advising the public on how to read the day's events. President Bush even went so far as to make a case for turning over disaster response from civil to military agencies, the latter supplemented by, if not subsidizing, private enterprise. Privately employed soldiers of fortune, recently repatriated by the likes of Blackhawk Security company from tours of duty protecting politicians and corporate entities in Iraq, invaded New Orleans, requisitioning forcibly abandoned apartments in the French Quarter as headquarters, and firing randomly upon perceived looters and loiterers with the tacit blessing of the more constrained National Guard. In the immediate aftermath of Katrina, New Orleans was, in a nutshell, simply Iraq come home.

The rebuilding of New Orleans will be instructive, too. A city with few residents for the foreseeable future, it will be turned into a Disneyland for the oil industry, and the racial poor will not be welcomed back (after all, they have been disbursed and dispersed to larger, more heterogeneous cities where their presence ultimately will become less noticed) (Guardian Unlimited 2005). New Orleans will be distilled overnight, transformed from a Black majority to a White majority city, a nightmare explicitly stated by the head of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Alphonso Jackson, himself ironically (and perhaps tragically) African American (DeBose 2005). A safe Democratic haven deep in the red-state South is being metamorphosed into yet another southern Republican stronghold. The working class will service the oil rich and worry free. The pollution will be rendered invisible in landfills and waterways once again to afflict the most vulnerable. A new sports stadium supporting privately owned sports teams valued at hundreds of millions of dollars each will be sponsored by public revenues. Mardi Gras will transmogrify from the conviviality of an organic urban celebration to the plasticity of tourist fanfare. New Orleans' spirit reduced to the cloned parades of Mickeys and Minnies. Welcome back, well, to Houston.

For those residents of the Gulf Coast who managed to survive the devastation, life after Katrina has meant pulling themselves back together with diminishing government support to rely on, all of the public relations rhetoric and promiscuous political promises notwithstanding. It is revealing that a large effort of private giving to hurricane relief has been heralded, in contrast to the forlorn public revenues enabled (despite all the magnanimous presidential promises of more or less unlimited support) amidst hand wringing about having to slow down extending existing tax cuts, most notably on capital gains and dividend payouts, and rendering permanent the ending of the estate tax.

Thus, those among the hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast residents whose homes were devastated by the hurricane and flooding and who sought federal support to rebuild and revive their properties were directed to apply for low-interest disaster loans from the Small Business Administration (SBA). A staggering 82% of the 276,000 loan applications received to date have been rejected, overwhelmingly because incomes are too meager or credit ratings too low to qualify. Predictably, the loans that have been approved have gone exclusively to wealthier and Whiter neighborhoods in New Orleans, those thus more readily able to rebuild. Rejected applicants are eligible for home repair grants from the FEMA, but the grant amount in each case is capped at about one-seventh the loan amounts available from the SBA. The likes of the Ninth and Lower-Ninth Wards remain largely empty, mildewed, cordoned-off disaster areas with little relief in sight (Kestin et al., 2005). Federal policy reinstates the privatized racial divide between the haves and the “would rather not have around.”

The respective experiences of universities in the city serve to bear this out. Tulane University—private, overwhelmingly White, and wealthy—is well on the way to being cleaned up and set to welcome back its student body and (albeit diminished) faculty in January 2006; Black city schools such as Dillard, Xavier, and Southern, their physical plant more or less completely ruined by Katrina's flooding, will be fortunate ever to reopen. The federal government has lived up to President Bush's promises to do whatever it takes to rebuild New Orleans at best partially—in both senses of the term (Crenson 2005). Post-Katrina New Orleans has laid bare for all of us to see what neocon America really amounts to. Privatizing the support system means just that: sustaining and securing the structures of support for private, corporately channeled interests, while allocating less and less for everyone else.

When Kanye West declared during the national telethon to raise money for the victims of Katrina that George Bush “doesn't care about Black people,” he personalized and individualized what for the past twenty years has been turned effectively into a deeply institutional rationality (Associated Press 2005). Since the Reagan administration, and exacerbated dramatically under George W. Bush, the state is being restructured in such a way that poor people generally—which means especially Black citizens—are not to be taken into consideration, cared for, or regarded with compassion by the institutional apparatuses representing the state.

The effect of the civil rights successes for conservatives in the United States was to read the state as being in the service of Black Americans. It had become, for African Americans, the largest postsegregation employer, the instrument of affirmative action, the educator of choice if not necessity, the guarantor of welfare rights when all else failed (or, in this dismissive scheme of things, more likely as the first resort), and the underwriter of housing for those who might otherwise have none. In short, the state was seen by racial conservationists to have been metamorphosed by the civil rights revolution into a Black institution, or at least one whose mission was now first and foremost to serve the interests of African Americans. The most effective counter, on the conservationist view, both instrumentally and to avoid being seen as racist, would be to target the institution of the state itself. Kill Goliath and the philistines with a single fling: restrict Black advancement, thus cutting out the possibility of additional competition, while delimiting state power, long a central conservative tenet. And so that it cannot respond to perceived crisis after crisis of racially driven impoverishment—gangs, crack cocaine, HIV/AIDS, educational failure, intensified poverty, urban blight—other than through criminalizing the most vulnerable, the state is being steadily denuded of the resources of response.

Underlying these effects, prompting them both directly and indirectly, is a set of ideological presumptions and at least implicit discursive articulations that define racial americanization. Most basically, homogenized apartness is taken as the norm of a deracialized—a declaratively raceless—polity. It is taken as the assumed, the natural, the given. Integration, or even desegregation, accordingly comes over as unnatural, literally absurd, and irrational in the prevailing order of things, requiring intervention by the state at the cost of liberty: the freedom to choose where one lives or is educated, whom one hires or works with, where one hangs out, worships, or may be laid to rest. Racial americanists often ask what is so wrong with wanting to live only among one's own, among those culturally (and so presumptively racially) like oneself. Besides the fact that such presumed homogeneity necessarily takes for granted the coherence, purity, boundedness, and racial identity of cultural likeness, such homogeneity can only be purchased with the coin of severe repression, by purging difference and denying its influence, if not its miscegenating seed. Homogeneity produces an ethnoracial class the insistent extension of which necessitates segregation. If the suburb of Gretna, a bridge away across the Mississippi, was to maintain its self-promoting fantasy as a safe haven, the African American inhabitants of New Orleans had to be kept at arm's length by forcibly closing the bridge, even at the cost of drowning those seeking refuge as Katrina floodwaters lapped at their waists (Cadenhead 2005).

The second assumption is that standards of civility, sociality, morality, self-determination, and well-being are represented overwhelmingly as White, that is, as those associated with the structure of Whiteness. These are assumed as the norm, as the criteria of judgment, as representing what everyone else should aspire to. It was the Blackness of the Superdome inhabitants and street looters that the media stressed (“they are so Black,” declared Wolf Blitzer of CNN, in an ambiguous mix of paternalistic pathos and disgusting disdain [CNN 2005]), their slothfulness and gangsterism, their lack of civility, and their inability to fend for themselves.

Third, Whites are projected as the real victims of the excess of antiracist pathos (of leftist antiracist racism, of political correctness, of liberal soft-headedness, of the ideology of egalitarianism). New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was repeatedly portrayed as incompetent, as too slow to the response, as having no effective emergency plan in place. By contrast, until his incompetence proved irrepressible and he had to go, becoming the fall guy for an incompetent and morally bankrupt administration, the narcissistically out-of-place head of FEMA, Michael Brown, was lauded publicly by the president for the “heckuva job he was doing.” We find, in a nutshell, within this contrast all the ironies surrounding affirmative action and its criticisms: a Black, democratically elected official chastised for failing to deliver emergency resources that he has repeatedly been denied, despite his plaintive pleas through the media when his official requests fell on deaf ears and empty offices; by contrast, a White, politically connected FEMA director lacking any of the competencies or qualities for the position to which he had been appointed solely because of his fundraising support for the president's re-election campaign. The deeper tragedy is that, in the New Orleans of tomorrow, a Black mayor will be far less likely to be elected because of the racial facelift the city is undergoing in its redesign. Urban regeneration and gentrification, we have long known, produce racial reapportionment and political “rectification.” The difference this time around, in contrast, say, to the DeLay-ing tactics used recently in Texas, also to devastating effect, will concern only the means of delivery.

Residential segregation tends to be reflected in and reinforced by what we might call “political segregation.” African American voters tend overwhelmingly to vote for Democratic Party candidates. Of the 225 Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives, none is Black, and the three Hispanics are all Cuban American. Of the more than 3500 Republican members of state legislatures, just sixteen are Black and thirteen Hispanic. Democrats who are not White, by contrast, number sixty-seven in the U.S. House of Representatives, and account for 20% of Democratic state legislators. In recent presidential elections, Republicans accordingly have taken to strategies of discouraging Blacks from voting, going so far as to intimidate elderly Black people from showing up at polling booths, or requiring forms of voter identification that unduly burden poor (and so disproportionately Black or Hispanic) voters (Haines 2005). Thus uniformed state troopers in swing states such as Florida have asserted themselves visibly in the doorways of polling stations to remind African Americans of the historical horrors of casting a vote, and older Black people, registered Democrats all, have been visited at home by investigators on trumped-up charges of voter fraud. Even where Republicans have gestured at diversifying their voter base (much as they might their investment portfolio), their overriding strategy in the face of rapidly heterogenizing multiculture has been twofold. First, because White voters tend largely to vote Republican, to ensure that they vote in elections. And, second, to reproduce White legislative majorities—by running almost exclusively White candidates—at more or less all levels of elected government. New Orleans is simply a more costly version of the recent Texas reapportionment strategy. By any means necessary?

So, in terms of the institutionalization and reproduction of racial americanization, these new forms of segregation have managed to informally impose what used to be formally produced, both to realize and virtualize segregative exclusions. Race continues to define, globally as domestically, where one can go, what one can do, how one is seen and treated, one's social, economic, political, legal, and cultural, in short: one's daily experience and prospects. Global circulation, like local city space, is increasingly contradictory: as there is greater heterogeneity and multiplicity, so segregation is refined; as visible openness and accessibility are enlarged, so exclusionary totalization is extended; as interaction is increased, so access is monitored, traversal is policed, and intercourse comes under surveillance. As boundaries and borders become more permeable, they are refixed in the social imaginary, shifting from the visible to the virtual, from the formalized to the experiential, from the legal to the cultural and economic.

National (including now “homeland”) security has become the abiding insomnia of American paranoia. Where segregation has been privatized, along with much else in American life, its logic has come to dominate U.S. foreign policy. Segregation was never about the complete dislocation of one racially conceived group from another—a final solution of another sort—so much as it was conceived as a logic of ongoing control. Blacks were to be excluded from the social life of Whiteness for all purposes other than menial services, demeaning labor, and sometimes social entertainment, including sexual experimentation or satisfaction. The logic in the case of New Orleans is of the same order. One's presence is warranted only in so far and for so long as one services some material condition or ideological figuration of local urban or national interests, even if simply to take the edge off the charge of racism, which everyone cringes at, even as they perpetuate the structure and practices of its reproduction. Racial americanization is, in the deepest sense, a form of crisis creation and control, manipulation and management, personally and politically, individually and institutionally, ideologically and representationally.

In short, the state, in the silently circulated name of racial americanization, is being deva-stated. Compassionate conservativism is passionate only about forcing a narrowly ideological agenda on us all, and compassionate about nothing else than the calculation of narrow self-interest. The state is in the process of being structurally transformed from a robust set of institutional apparatuses concerned above all to advance the welfare of its citizens into a structure troubled only with securing the most elevated private interests from the perceived contamination and threat of those deemed for various reasons not to belong, to have little or no standing, the welfare of whom is calculated to cost too much, economically or politically. New Orleans has simply drawn this contemporary socioracial dynamic and its debilitating effects momentarily out of the shadows and placed it into the blinding light of day.